Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Go Ahead....talk to strangers

Social Networking in the Classroom with Twitter Using GroupTweetMost middle school and many elementary students are already networking online, so why not teach them how to do it right? After all, elementary schools have the unique opportunity to introduce kids to social networking before they stumble upon the pitfalls of web-based socializing themselves.A great way to introduce elementary age students to social networking is through a school-based network. These controlled environments allow schools to limit access and monitor use. School-based networks don’t collect personal information or preferences for marketing purposes, and there’s no entry for uninvited guests. Twitter is a hugely popular social network for the public. But how can we use it in the classroom safely but still teach the essence of its collaborative and interactive features? GroupTweetGroupTweet can be set up where your classroom has a single Twitter account that can be updated by all the students as well as the teachers. It's a great way to centralize the classroom discussion under a single Twitter timeline. If you want to break up the class into different groups you can also create a new account for each group, mark it "Protected" and then activate it with GroupTweet.com. Teachers can send direct messages to the group account and the messages will be converted into Tweets for only the Group's followers to see. In addition, GroupTweet allows for the creation of anonymous accounts as well. This may be usefule if the students need to communicate with a public twitter account or group as a resource for a lesson or project without using student names.